HBO BIG ON GAL DEATH: I WAS IN A PANIC
Pleads guilty over OD of party-pal doc
An HBO producer pleaded guilty Tuesday to dragging a married Long Island doctor, unconscious from a cocaine overdose, to the lobby of his drug dealer’s Chelsea apartment building, leaving her there to die.
“I was scared, frightened and panicked,” Marc Henry Johnson — a producer of “The Deuce,” an HBO pilot about Manhattan’s seedy 42nd Street porn and prostitution trade in the ’ 70s and ’ 80s — told a Manhattan federal judge in his plea.
The feds said Johnson, 52, helped ex-con James Holder drag Dr. Kiersten Rickenbach Cerveny out of Holder’s apartment after a night of hard partying in 2015.
Johnson then abandoned the mother of three as EMTs arrived to find her unresponsive and with her panties in her purse, law-enforcement officials said.
Cerveny, 38, a dermatologist and mother of three from Manhasset, had told her husband she was going out partying with her girlfriends in Manhattan.
On Tuesday, Johnson said he dragged her to the hallway because Holder demanded that they “get her body out of here.”
Johnson said he wanted to help Holder protect his drug business. “This was wrong,” the producer said, his voice quavering.
Johnson insisted that he had tried to give Cerveny CPR after Holder took off, and that he called 911 — although federal prosecutors have said he wouldn’t give his name to emergency-desk operators.
Cerveny was found with bruises around her neck, her body sprawled across the front entry of the five-story walk-up.
“Her feet were holding the front door open, and her head was by the corner of the door frame,” an EMT on the scene told The Post at the time.
Cerveny, a former beauty queen from New Jersey, lived with her husband, Andrew, and their three young children in a million-dollar home.
Johnson was charged with at- tempting to distribute cocaine and acting as an accessory after the fact. He pleaded guilty to the latter count and faces up to two years in prison per the plea deal.
“Marc Henry Johnson’s immediate response to seeing a dying overdose victim should have been to summon help,” acting Manhattan US Attorney Joon Kim said after the plea. “Instead, Johnson helped his cocaine dealer cover up the drug crime by moving the victim’s body,”
Text messages from earlier in the night showed Johnson telling a friend that he planned to head to his dealer’s house “for a pickup” before meeting with Cerveny and her friends at a bar.
Once Johnson arrived at the girls’ night out on the Lower East Side, “he had a significant amount of cocaine, which he offered to share,” the feds said.